MIKE BURKE

Allegany Communications Sports

To call the first full month of baseball around here uninspiring would be accurate, but uninspiring. It’s been a bloody mess.

As of the first day of May, the Washington Nationals were off to the best start of the three area teams with a … 13-18 record? The Baltimore Orioles were next at 12-18, and it took a best-of-three series win over the first-place Yankees (despite being outscored 22-12) to get the record that good; and next were the Washington Nationals at 12-19.

The biggest news to come out of any of the three teams occurred on Wednesday night, not when Felix Bautista registered his second consecutive three-batter save to secure the series win for the Orioles, but when a fan shockingly fell 21 feet from the first row of the Clemente wall in right field and onto the warning track at PNC Park during the seventh inning of the Cubs-Pirates game.

The man laid on the field motionless and was attended to by Pirates and Cubs training staff, along with EMS professionals nearby.

Pittsburgh police provided an update on Thursday, saying the man remained in critical condition and that the incident is being treated as accidental in nature.

The incident clearly affected everyone who was in the ballpark on Wednesday and the mood carried over to Thursday afternoon when the Pirates hosted the Cubs in the third game of the series, as a public statement from Pirates owner Bob Nutting was read and displayed on the scoreboard. Trainers from both teams and EMS professionals were thanked for their efforts before the national anthem was played and baseball resumed.

There have been accounts of the accident from fans who were sitting in the same section as the man who fell, and alcohol was said to have played a factor. The overriding concern is naturally the well-being of the man, so it shouldn’t matter how or why he fell. Just that he’s going to be well.

The Pirates won on Wednesday, but lost on Thursday, 8-3, despite having Paul Skenes on the mound. They’ve been a disappointment so far because there have been no signs of improvement, which honestly shouldn’t come as a surprise since the organization did very little over the offseason to improve the team.

Still, call me anything but late for the cocktail hour, because I still believe the Pirates will get better this season because of their starting pitching.

The Nationals’ starting pitching, like the Pirates’, is pretty good. They have good, young position players, too. Now it’s just a matter of their young players growing into their feet and the rebuild coming to fruition by the front office adding to what’s already been put into place.

General manager Mike Rizzo has done this before. He’s currently doing it again. It will all depend on how far ownership will allow him to enhance it.

Which brings us to the Orioles, who have floundered about this season in the midst of a championship window that was created by the painstaking but successful rebuild of 2017-22.

The Orioles currently have 13 players on the injured list, including their three best starting pitchers, which is not exclusive to the Orioles, as teams such as the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers can attest. Elbow and shoulder injuries for pitchers, afterall, are the monster that was created by maximum effort on each pitch, spin rate and travel baseball.

Injuries happen in baseball, but so does the offseason and it more and more seems the Orioles’ previous offseason was squandered by general manager Mike Elias, particularly in light of the injuries the club incurred last season prior to its second-half demise that led to a second consecutive one-and-done postseason.

Manager Brandon Hyde is the easy target, because blaming the manager is the easiest thing for a baseball fan to do; but he can only play who he has to play, and for two-and-a-half years up to last season’s All-Star break, when the Orioles were the winningest team in the American League, he had better players to put out there than he does now.

When you replace Corbin Burnes, Anthony Santander and James McCann with 41-year-old Charlie Morton, Tomoyuki Sugano, Tyler O’Neill and Gary Sanchez, you didn’t do your job, particularly when the new ownership group tells you to spend as freely as you want to.

Transition year? Perhaps with Sanchez, who now has twice as many days on the IL than he does hits, and with O’Neill, who is always on the IL, and is again, but why the lack of pitching when this team is positioned to win now?

The Baltimore Sun reported on Thursday Orioles players have their manager’s back and are taking responsibility for the poor start to the season, which is admirable since very few of them have been producing.

The truth is, with the guys who left, willingly and unwillingly, not nearly enough was brought in to adequately fill the void.

That’s not on the manager. It’s on the general manager.

Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT